What’s the impact of remote monitoring for people being treated for cancer? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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People who used a remote monitoring tool to report daily symptoms as they underwent cancer treatment did better with regard to managing their treatment than those who did not, a new study finds. William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, isn’t surprised.

Nelson: What they were looking at were symptoms that people started with and symptoms that they would acquire as they are being treated with chemotherapy and radiation therapy and the like, is monitoring this basically at home 24 hour monitoring with one of these tools, can they identify symptoms and intercept them in some way so that they could be better managed. The answer was yes. When they did this kind of monitoring, when you looked at the folks who did the monitoring they didn’t get that much more and the more would have been related to the treatment and so managing the treatment associated symptoms with this monitoring tool seemed to be helpful.  :32

Nelson says people also like participating in their own care and felt more in partnership with their medical team. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.